Tag Archives: Reviews

I kept putting off reading The Knife of Letting Never Go, despite the rave reviews or perhaps in spite of them. I read the sample chapter several times but kept finding other books that were clamouring more loudly to climb up my To Read list.

When I did get to the first book in the Chaos Walking trilogy, I loved it. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that Mr Ness has created a universe where men can hear each other’s thoughts, or ‘noise’, along with those of animals. This produces insights that can be comic, moving, tragic or horrific. It’s truly compelling, particularly when we learn women can hear male thoughts but men cannot read female minds. Unsurprisingly, the voices are unique – whether you like the characters or not.

The second book, The Ask and the Answer, didn’t wow me quite as much, although it did its job – setting the foundations for an epic finale. And man, does the third book deliver.

Monsters of Men takes the male-female human-animal-monster themes of the first two books and turns them up to 11. It adds an acute awareness of indigenous dispossession, environmental degradation and the consequences of war. It is a remarkable climax to the trilogy, even managing to introduce a new narrative perspective.

As an author working on creating my own new universe, I doff my cap to Mr Ness. He has set the bar very high indeed.

Apologies for the apparent lack of action here on Thunder Road but it feels a bit like I’ve been running the wrong way along an escalator for the past two weeks. As in lose-a-car, visit-four-schools-in-five days, work-three-jobs, gain-a-car, school-council, launch-a-book, attend-Book-Week-functions and much, much more. Don’t get me wrong. It’s been great. But I wouldn’t be surprised if I stop making sense somewhere soon. Meerkats.

Whoops.

The launch night for Five Parts Dead was magnificent. Lots of friends, family and supporters I didn’t know I had. I was humbled by the crowd, the book sales, the smiles, the kind words from guest speaker Sally Rippin and, as the Working Dog team once wrote, “the general vibe of the thing”. The goodwill in the air was palpable.

With the greatest of respect for Tye, I’d never claim Five Parts Dead is a ‘perfect’ book – but then my opinion isn’t really what counts here. The magic of reading means that we’ll all bond with books occasionally, tumbling into the universe that exists between the pages. It’s the connection between the reader and the book that earns the review. I can only hope other readers find themselves similarly immersed in this story.

Another review surfaced on the most excellently named book blog Food for Silverfish. I can’t link to the exact post at present so am reproducing the comments here:

“i am nearly finished tim pegler’s new one, five parts dead. i likes it! it’s a sort of spooky historical/modern day flippy thing. by flippy thing i mean that it has the past trying to creep into the present, and our protagonist dan has to work out what the ghosties are trying to tell him while also getting his own life back on track. so far it is nicely eerie and very enjoyable. and there are no ‘ghosties’ in it as such, i’m just being a bit flippant again. sorry. i recommend it though.”

Imagine you’ve put your heart and soul into designing a car. You want it to be attractive, fun to drive, functional, fuel efficient and a crowd-pleaser. Once your work is done, a team of engineers work with you to make the dream real. Then it hits the streets … and is branded the worst set of wheels since the Ford Edsel. The horror.

Waiting for word-of-mouth and media reviews on a book is kind of similar. I know how hard I worked and the amount of toil contributed by the publishers. As a team we’ve sculpted and scraped, spat and polished, sweated and shivered to get the story right. Now it’s up to readers to rule on whether we nailed it.

The first full review I’ve seen for Five Parts Dead has been published – and, thankfully, it’s a great start. You can check it out here.